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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

WSJ: NSA surveillance reach broader than publicly acknowledged

The National Security Agency's surveillance network has the
capacity to spy on 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic, The Wall StreetJournal reports.

Citing current and former NSA officials for the 75 percent
figure, the paper reported that the agency can observe more of Americans'
online communications than officials have publicly acknowledged.

The NSA's system of programs that filter communications,
achieved with the help of telecommunications companies, is designed to look for
communications that either start or end abroad, or happen to pass through the
U.S. between foreign countries. However, the officials told the Journal that
the system's reach is so broad, that it is more likely that purely domestic
communications will be intercepted as a byproduct of the hunt for foreign ones.

The system works by using algorithms that act as filters,
designed to let high-value information through amid more benign chatter.
However, after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, a former to intelligence
official told the Journal that the government changed its definition of
"reasonable" intelligence collection, enabling the NSA to widen the
holes in the "filtering" system.

The details are the latest to emerge about the NSA's
operations and capabilities, as authorities in the U.S. and other countries try
to stop the release of more information about the elaborate surveillance
network. Members of Congress on the intelligence committees, as well as past
intelligence officials, recently have spoken up in defense of the agency,
particularly after a report showing the agency had broken privacy rules and
overstepped its authority thousands of times.

The NSA programs described by the Journal differ from the
programs described by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in a series of leaks
earlier this summer. Snowden described a program to acquire Americans' phone
records, as well as another program, known as PRISM, that made requests from
Internet companies for stored data. By contrast, the Internet monitoring
systems have the capability to track almost any online activity, so long as it
is covered by a broad court order.

The NSA programs are overseen and approved by the secret
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. An NSA spokeswoman told the Journal
that its actions were both legal and respectful of Americans' privacy. In a
statement made to Reuters, the NSA repeated the assertion, saying, "We
defend the United States from such threats while fiercely working to protect
the privacy rights of U.S. persons.